I am new to Shotcut and I have a question re. audio. I am producing music tutorial video clips with main focus on sound quality.
Way of working:
I use Reaper (music editing software) to edit the audio material in sync with the video. (Reaper is great for sound editing, but rather limited for video editing)
After rendering from Reaper I load this video/audio clip in Shotcut to edit the video a bit.
Then I export/render this video from Shotcut (as mp4).
When I playback this final export version then (no matter if VLC, Widows Media Player, iTunes or Youtube), I get the impression of slight loss in sound quality (especially high frequencies) compared to the audio track before editing in Shotcut - even though I have done no sound editing in Shotcut.
Also strange: filesize is only half as big as before editing in Shotcut.
Is it possible that Shotcut affects the audio track quality post video editing and rendering, without touching any sound editing options in Shotcut?
Do I have to adjust settings in Shotcut in a certain way to keep the audio quality exactly as before editing?
Hope I made myself clear, sorry English is not my first language.
With the Nyquist Limit (laws of physics) at F/2, that is at 24kHz, which means there has to be a “brickwall” filter somewhere below that, which means that somewhere in the 17+ kHZ you are going to start seeing roll-off.
The video I looked at in VLC had a theoretical bitrate of 3 Mbs, (48 K x 32 x 2) but the codec in Shotcut said 384 kbs, so somebody is inside that machine compressing for all they are worth (I hope those little electronic elves are well paid).
As @DRM rightly noted, the kbps is very important, as it controls the compression. You may want to set that much higher in Reaper as well, say 384k perhaps.
If it was me, doing high fidelity audio, I would also set both Reaper and Shotcut to 96000 samples per second.
Ouch!
No, nothing that harsh. It is very subtle, maybe even a illusion. Sounds like the higher frequencies of an accoustic guitar are slightly washed out, kind of “blurred” (if that makes sense in an audio context)
That is what I would expect from your sample rates.
The extreme low-pass filter (“brickwall filter”) needed to keep the frequencies near, at and above one-half the sample rate away from the digitization will be rolling-off already at the overtones of the high notes of an acoustic guitar, and the filter plays absolute havoc with the phase fidelity at those frequencies.
